I still use WMP 6 (mplayer2.exe in the media player folder), but only for videos that
Media Player Classic can't handle correctly, and
Foobar 2000 for my audio. Foobar has a very powerful display scripting language buit in so you it will show your file tags just the way you want in your playlist. It also plays ogg files, flac, shorten, and a number of other non-DRM codecs natively. If you ripped a lot of files with WMP, the special version can play .wma as well.
All three of those players are also a lot lighter weight than WMP, but don't include any syncing functions. I think Foobar can burn cds, but I have other programs I use for that.